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The greatest Latino baseball player of them all

Here's a trivia question to stump your friends and confound political correctness: Who was, without a doubt, the greatest Latino baseball player of all time? Roberto Clemente? Albert Pujols? Juan Marichal?

Actually, the answer is Ted Williams, the Boston Red Sox immortal who had the highest career on-base percentage in history.

But no one thinks of "The Splendid Splinter" as Hispanic, despite the fact that his mother, May Venzor, was a Mexican national from El Paso. In a fascinating new Williams biography, "The Kid," author Ben Bradlee Jr. portrays the baseball superstar hiding his Latino origins out of embarrassment and fear.

This history shows the stupidity in the notion that the "Hispanic" designation constitutes a racial identity. It's actually a misleading ethnic category, applied indiscriminately to people of numerous racial backgrounds, that can be either emphasized … or ignored.